Echo

What Terry had withheld was that he had seen Billy W again before he died, just once, at the warehouse. It was early in the morning and the boy had been sitting on the scrubland at the back, staring out over the river. There had been a dawn mist over the water, which the warming sun had begun to burn off. He described himself as feeling 'fucking depressed.'

'Life weren't the same when old Billy weren't around. Okay, he were a pain in the butt most of the time, but I'd kind of got used to him. Know what I mean? Lawrence got it about right. It were like having a dad about the place- nah, more like a granddad. Anyway, I turned round at one point and the bastard was sitting next to me. It gave me a shock because I hadn't heard him coming. Matter of fact, I don't know how I didn't have a heart attack.' He paused to reflect. 'To be honest, I thought he were a ghost,' he went on. 'He looked about as bad as I'd ever seen him-with white skin and lips that looked as if there was no blood in them.' He shuddered at the memory. 'So I asked him what he'd been doing and he said 'toning.' '

Deacon waited. 'Did he say anything else?' he asked when Terry didn't go on.

'Yeah, it didn't make much sense, though. He said 'un-toned sin's the invisible worm.'

Pensively, Deacon stroked his jaw. 'I should think he said 'atoning' and 'unatoned.' The atonement of sins is the same as repentance.' He brooded for a while, searching through his memory for word associations. 'Blake wrote a poem called The Sick Rose,' he said at last. 'It's about a beautiful rose that's dying inside because an invisible worm is eating away at its heart.' He stared out of the windshield. 'You can interpret its symbolism any way you like, but Billy presumably interpreted the worm as unexpiated sin.' He paused again. 'He can't have been talking about his own atonement because he was torturing himself for his sins,' he said slowly, 'which leaves only Amanda. Do you understand all that?''

'Sure, I'm not totally dumb, you know, and you said she reeked of roses. In any case, it was her place he made me take him to.'

'How do you mean 'made'?'

'He just set off. All I could do was follow. He didn't say a word the whole way, then just walked in her garage and shut the door behind him.'

Deacon regarded him curiously. 'Did you know it was her house?'

'No. It was just a house.'

'How did Billy know the garage door would be open?'

Terry shrugged. 'Luck?' he suggested. 'None of the others were.'

'Did he say anything before he went into it?'

'Only goodbye.'

Deacon shook his head in bewilderment at the boy's apparent acceptance of Billy's bizarre behavior. 'Didn't you ask him what he was doing? Why he wanted to go there? What it was all about?''

' 'Course I did, but he didn't answer. And he looked that ill, I thought he'd peg out on me at any moment, so I weren't keen to make matters worse by pestering. You couldn't never stop Billy doing what he wanted to do.'

'But weren't you worried when he didn't come back to the warehouse? Why didn't you go and fetch him?'

The injured look reappeared on Terry's face. 'I did, sort of. I went and hung around the entrance to the estate the next day but there weren't no sign of him, and I was too scared to go in there two days in a row in case the cops came down on me like a ton of bricks for casing the joint. Anyway, I was afraid of getting Billy in shit if he were holed up somewhere cozy. So me and Tom talked it over and we'd got to the point of thinking we'd go round and suss the place out, when Tom read in a newspaper that Billy'd snuffed it in Amanda's garage.' He shrugged. 'And that were the end of it.'

'Can you remember which day you took Billy there?'

Terry looked uncomfortable. 'Yeah, but Tom reckons I was stoned most of that week and got everything muddled. It ain't true, but it's the only thing that makes sense. Me and him went all the way to the cemetery after Amanda told us she'd done the honors for Billy, just to make sure she weren't lying about it, and it was there in black and white. Billy Blake, died June twelfth, nineteen ninety-five.'

Deacon flicked through his diary. 'The twelfth was a Monday, and the pathologist estimated he'd been dead five days when the body was found on the following Friday. So, which day did you see him?'

'The Tuesday. And it was the Wednesday I hung about outside the estate, the Thursday me and Tom talked it over, and the Friday we reckoned we'd go round to take a butcher's. It were about eight o'clock at night, we was on our way, Tom lifts an Evening Standard from a bin, and there's this steaming great headline saying: Homeless man starves to death. So he reads it and goes: 'Jesus, you're an arsehole, Terry, the bastard's been dead for days and you've suckered me into looking for a corpse.' '

Deacon was silent for so long that Terry eventually spoke again. 'Yeah, well, maybe Tom was right. Maybe it was the Tuesday before, and I was so stoned I let a whole week go by before I did anything.'

'According to the police he went into the garage on Saturday the tenth.'

'It weren't a Saturday when I saw him,' said the boy decidedly. 'Saturdays are good tourist days, so I'd've been out begging.'

Deacon felt for the key in the ignition. 'How long after Billy died did Amanda come asking questions?'

'A few weeks. She'd paid for his cremation by then because she told us about it.'

The engine fired and he put it into gear. 'Why didn't you tell her Billy was still alive on the Tuesday?'

Terry stared despondently out of the window. 'For the same reason I didn't tell you. I don't reckon he was, see. Matter of fact I don't like to think about it too much. I mean, d'you believe in ghosts?'

Deacon recalled the smell of death that had been in Amanda's house and wondered uneasily about the nature